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Selected Poems
Michael Ondaatje has called Sharon Olds's poetry 'pure fire in the hands' and cheered the 'roughness and humour and brag and tenderness and completion in her work as she carries the reader through rooms of passion and loss'. This rich selection - made by the author - exhibits those qualities in poem after poem, reflecting, moreover, an exciting experimentation with rhythm and language and a movement toward an embrace beyond the personal. Subjects are revisited - the pain of childhood, adolescent sexual stirrings, the fulfilment of marriage, the wonder of children - but each re-casting penetrates ever more deeply, enriched by new perceptions and conceits.
A powerful distillation of the best work from one of America's most gifted and widely read poets, drawn from her seven published volumes, this is a testament to a remarkable writer's depth, range and continuing development.
A powerful distillation of the best work from one of America's most gifted and widely read poets, drawn from her seven published volumes, this is a testament to a remarkable writer's depth, range and continuing development.
- GenresPoetry
160 pages, Paperback
First published October 6, 2005
9 people are currently reading
210 people want to read
About the author
Sharon Olds
76 books764 followersBorn in San Francisco on November 19, 1942, Sharon Olds earned a B.A. at Stanford University and a Ph.D. at Columbia University.
Her first collection of poems, Satan Says (1980), received the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award. Olds's following collection, The Dead & the Living (1983), received the Lamont Poetry Selection in 1983 and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Her other collections include Strike Sparks: Selected Poems (2004, Knopf), The Unswept Room (2002), Blood, Tin, Straw (1999), The Gold Cell (1997), The Wellspring (1995), and The Father (1992), which was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
About Olds's poetry, one reviewer for the New York Times said, "Her work has a robust sensuality, a delight in the physical that is almost Whitmanesque. She has made the minutiae of a woman's everyday life as valid a subject for poetry as the grand abstract themes that have preoccupied other poets."
Olds's numerous honors include a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Ploughshares, and has been anthologized in more than a hundred collections.
Olds held the position of New York State Poet from 1998 to 2000. She currently teaches poetry workshops at New York University's Graduate Creative Writing Program as well as a workshop at Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island in New York. She was elected an Academy Chancellor in 2006. She lives in New York City.
Her first collection of poems, Satan Says (1980), received the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award. Olds's following collection, The Dead & the Living (1983), received the Lamont Poetry Selection in 1983 and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Her other collections include Strike Sparks: Selected Poems (2004, Knopf), The Unswept Room (2002), Blood, Tin, Straw (1999), The Gold Cell (1997), The Wellspring (1995), and The Father (1992), which was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
About Olds's poetry, one reviewer for the New York Times said, "Her work has a robust sensuality, a delight in the physical that is almost Whitmanesque. She has made the minutiae of a woman's everyday life as valid a subject for poetry as the grand abstract themes that have preoccupied other poets."
Olds's numerous honors include a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Ploughshares, and has been anthologized in more than a hundred collections.
Olds held the position of New York State Poet from 1998 to 2000. She currently teaches poetry workshops at New York University's Graduate Creative Writing Program as well as a workshop at Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island in New York. She was elected an Academy Chancellor in 2006. She lives in New York City.
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
June 6, 2023
“I want to live. I
take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips, like chips of flint, as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.”
Kate Clanchy is quoted on the back of this book saying, 'Olds remains too little known in the UK...readers new to her will be astounded.'
Well, this UK citizen couldn't agree more. From 'Indictment Of Senior Officers' I was instantly dazzled and in awe. Each word sizzles and sparks on the pages. It's clear how much Olds personal experiences have made a lasting impact on her poems, especially the death of her Father, which make her pieces all the more haunting. Her poems are lovely, like fine ribbons; little stories she can choose to make either delightful and pleasant, or brutal and unforgiving, but always undoubtedly moving and memorable. Her choice of words are carefully selected so that each line reverberates page after page. Sensational. An incredibly underrated poet. Anyone who feels slightly uninspired should go read this lady now.
“I wonder now only when it will happen,
when the young mother will hear the
noise like somebody's pressure cooker
down the block, going off. She'll go out on the yard,
holding her small daughter in her arms,
and there, above the end of the street, in the
air above the line of the tress,
she will see it rising, lifting up
over the horizon, the upper rim of the
gold ball, large as a giant
planet starting to lift up over ours.
She will stand there in the yard holding her daughter,
looking at it rise and grow and blossom and rise,
and the child will open her arms to it,
it will look so beautiful.”
(Read for poetry book club - June 2013)
June 26, 2022
olds is so violent, visceral, raw, pure, fresh i just and simply could not love something written by her.
July 30, 2011
As raw, self-obsessed and self-aware as Frida Kahlo! And way ahead of her time....
February 26, 2025
Beautiful stuff. Some real thought changers in here. Olds has a gift for finding phrases that stick with you for how gruesome and beautiful they are.
April 1, 2022
Sharon Olds is a pioneer, a visionary, and she is among America’s greatest poets. This collection offers us an overview into her willingness to explore any subject, whether childhood abuse, sexual awakening, martial intimacy, or the throes of motherhood. Olds is not only daring in how she takes on any topic and locates truth and produces emotion, but she also delivers her vision in a style that is lyrical and exploratory with its language, imagery, and metaphors. She is extraordinary in how she utilizes memories and experiences and turns them into blistering narrative poems. She is a master of her craft, an original like few others.
November 9, 2018
Sharon Olds eschews formal poetic forms and writes primarily about her own life. She seems to me to follow in the tradition of Robert Lowell. I find her poems very powerful and readable but surprisingly unquotable. I liked this "greatest hits" less than the magnificent "Stag's Leap," for which she won the Pullitzer prize and the T S Eliot Prize. That book told the story of her divorce, and I find her most powerful when she tells a story in a sequence of poems. I'm now reading "The Dead and the Living," which has more coherence than the selected poems.
June 13, 2022
I'm glad my best friend turned me on to Olds. Olds has a unique style that hits the right notes with me. I like direct, not poets who hide themselves. And I don't like poets who cry on the page like its a tissue or something. There's a way of writing about emotions and life's hardships without going the woe-is-me route, for sure. But Olds gets it. She gets to an essence I can see, and, like when I read Mary Oliver, I feel like she took me somewhere.
February 27, 2023
Sharon Olds was recommended to me by a good friend/mentor and she has become a massive inspiration for my writing. Confessional to its core, offering a beautiful take on the body and all its glories :))
June 2, 2020
3.5!
February 6, 2021
A lesson in painting a vivid, gritty picture for your readers. Olds is a masterful poet.
September 29, 2025
Very well written but disturbingly explicit
March 28, 2023
There was enough in here that I enjoyed, and that didn't leave me feeling disappointed, though I do admit I expected to love a lot more of these rather than just like them. Sharon Olds is the author of one of my favourite poems, so I suppose the bar was set high. I would be interested to read more collections by her, because my main issue with this collection was that so many of the poems were about sex. I get it, there's apparently a lot to say about sex, or at least some people seem to think so, but to be honest the subject bores me after the first few mentions and I feel that it gets shoehorned into a lot of places where it doesn't need to be. It feels like people assume that, if sex is involved (especially when written about with such poetic language) the piece is automatically deeper than it is, and while I'm not saying that's what's going on here, I'm wondering if it influences choice in collections. This is obviously a matter of personal taste -- I recognise that I'm the weirdo here, as a lot of people seem fascinated by the subject and enjoy using it as a means to explore many other subjects (love, personhood, relationship with their body, femininity/masculinity, autonomy, etc) and that's cool; I enjoy that. Just not enough to read dozens of poems on the same or similar subject, though. I do get to the point where I'm like we get it. You have sex.
Like I said, I'd still be interested in reading more, because despite the fact a lot of these poems weren't what I'd ordinarily go for, I could still appreciate Olds' grasp of language and I enjoy what she does with it. She has a wonderful way of placing words; the sentences seem clear and straight-forward at first, but the closer you look the more you realise that there's so much more going on. She takes huge subjects and manages to wrestle them into sentences that almost pin them down, giving words to otherwise intangible things, and that's what I love about poetry.
Like I said, I'd still be interested in reading more, because despite the fact a lot of these poems weren't what I'd ordinarily go for, I could still appreciate Olds' grasp of language and I enjoy what she does with it. She has a wonderful way of placing words; the sentences seem clear and straight-forward at first, but the closer you look the more you realise that there's so much more going on. She takes huge subjects and manages to wrestle them into sentences that almost pin them down, giving words to otherwise intangible things, and that's what I love about poetry.
January 2, 2015
I was first introduced to the work of Sharon Olds when I heard one of her poems in the 'Into the Wild' film. In fact, she worked closely with Sean Penn and Carine when making it. I immediately looked up the author, and ordered a copy of 'The Gold Cell' from a bookstore.
Fast forward a few years and this book fell into my hands. Again, I was in love with her work.
I don't read a lot of poetry, never have done. And a friend recently asked what this poet, Sharon Olds, wrote about. I didn't really know how to respond. I went for the word 'life.'
Sharon has the ability to put you right in her shoes. You picture her, sat there, writing down the words for the first time. You see her mind racing, you see her getting her thoughts down on paper, as pure as the reality, capturing that moment and letting it live forever in one of her books. You are tossed about. You live and breath her work. You sigh and you cry. You feel!And for me, a person that doesn't read much poetry, that is what poetry should be about. That is art. And that is Sharon Olds.
This collection is a great introduction to her work, but I feel one would benefit more by ordering one of her singular collections. Have a look at 'The Gold Cell' or 'The Father' as they were my favourite poems in this book.
Fast forward a few years and this book fell into my hands. Again, I was in love with her work.
I don't read a lot of poetry, never have done. And a friend recently asked what this poet, Sharon Olds, wrote about. I didn't really know how to respond. I went for the word 'life.'
Sharon has the ability to put you right in her shoes. You picture her, sat there, writing down the words for the first time. You see her mind racing, you see her getting her thoughts down on paper, as pure as the reality, capturing that moment and letting it live forever in one of her books. You are tossed about. You live and breath her work. You sigh and you cry. You feel!And for me, a person that doesn't read much poetry, that is what poetry should be about. That is art. And that is Sharon Olds.
This collection is a great introduction to her work, but I feel one would benefit more by ordering one of her singular collections. Have a look at 'The Gold Cell' or 'The Father' as they were my favourite poems in this book.
January 21, 2013
Searing, honest, lyrical and shocking- Olds is a deserving winner of the TS Eliot prize; looking forward to reading Stag's Leap. Highly recommend this selection as an introduction to her work.
December 5, 2013
Shockingly corporeal poetry that makes you recoil at its intimacy and yet compelling. Serious stuff but not taking itself too seriously - I tender The Pope's Penis as an example.
November 4, 2013
With simple construction and straightforward clarity her poems are beautiful in a matter-of-fact way. They have good bones, raw and real.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews